A Glut of Bands, Amid a Fog of Blaring Sound

Lee Spielman, center, and Garrett Stevenson, of the hardcore punk band Trash Talk from Sacramento, performing at Cake Shop on Thursday, as part of the annual CMJ Music Marathon.Credit
Willie Davis for The New York Times

A big part of this year’s CMJ Music Marathon — the 31st annual showcase for mostly new, mostly independent music presented by what began as College Music Journal — went by in a haze.

It wasn’t just the glut of more than 1,300 official band showcases, starting before noon and continuing well past 2 a.m., that took place Tuesday through Saturday in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Hoboken, N.J., along with repeat appearances by many of the bands at non-CMJ parties. The haze was in much of the music itself: a lavish application of reverb and distortion, of feedback and noise, of watery keyboard sounds and echoey, indecipherable vocals.

The musical result — for much of the rock, hip-hop and electronica I heard at CMJ — is bigger and blurrier, a larger-than-life sound that blares its own ambition; it’s not the modest, contained, collegiate indie-rock of the 1990s. But it can also be smoke and mirrors, a commotion around a hollow core.

This year’s CMJ left me with both impressions. There were, of course, many acts that fully deserved the attention they clamored for with two or three shows a day. Among them were Gauntlet Hair, whose music was a whirlwind of tremolo guitar strumming and bashing, shifting drumbeats; Purity Ring, with Megan James singing clear-voiced melodies over twitching, stuttering, trip-you-up electronic beats; Kendrick Lamar, a rapper from Compton, Calif., who’s not content with gangster clichés; Caveman, which wraps sturdy, straightforward songs and vocal harmonies in the distortion from guitars built by a band member; A Lull, whose songs built measured but grand crescendos laced with international polyrhythms, and Grace Woodroofe, an Australian singer and songwriter with a husky voice ready to unleash a bluesy howl.

And while there were bands from as far away as Taiwan and Australia, this year’s CMJ was swarmed with local New York City bands.

The abundance of independent music celebrated by CMJ is awash in paradoxes. The college radio stations that CMJ monitors with weekly charts once offered virtually the only chance to hear music outside the commercial mainstream, in limited vinyl pressings played for a few precious minutes on the air; now the Internet makes it all available, all the time, often free. For performers at the music marathon, the goal — elusive but not impossible — is building an audience while circumventing the pop machinery, and it can work. After a set at the Gramercy Theater that had a good part of the audience shouting along, verse after verse, Mr. Lamar thanked the fans he had reached with “no major budget, no radio.”

Meanwhile the Internet is devaluing a core element of showcases like the CMJ Music Marathon and its bigger, better organized counterpart in Austin, Tex., South by Southwest: the chance to see (and then brag about) a unique live performance in a small place. What happens at CMJ no longer stays at CMJ; it’s all over YouTube, often with the band’s eager assent. The showcase for the dedicated has become a platform for documentation; diehard concertgoers double as extras.

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With exposure come trends and mini-trends, some promising, some contrived. This was a CMJ full of demonstrative women, exorcising obsession and trauma with goth incantations. The reigning one was Zola Jesus, who managed a ritualistic intensity even during 10:30 a.m. set in a hotel lobby. But she had rivals like Chelsea Wolfe, EMA and Light Asylum, all working themselves up over pounding drums and drones. Zambri, with two harmonizing female singers, pushed toward eerier, electronic realms.

There were deadpan women too, like the Dum Dum Girls, who sing gloomy, death-haunted lyrics in classic girl-group structures, fringed with punky guitar distortion, and Memoryhouse, whose misty, serene songs often placed themselves, in both music and lyrics, on the border between waking and sleeping.

Electronica now pervades CMJ. There were solo laptop-and-sampler performers, like AraabMuzik, a producer whose performance strafes little trance-music synthesizer lines with rough drum samples that he tapped out live, his hands a blur, and Grimes, a woman who layered girlish high vocals amid vertiginous keyboard lines. Yellow Ostrich used a looping device that let its lead singer assemble vocal harmonies in songs that jumped all over the place, from wry plaints to assertive, tightly wound rock.

In some of the most promising music heard at CMJ, world-music rhythms are slipping into rock. Gotye, a Belgian-Australian songwriter who already has a huge hit — “Somebody That I Used to Know” — was using CMJ as a gateway to an American audience; he’s picked up lot of good ideas from Sting, like African-diaspora rhythms and pop concision, and his songs had a meticulous, gadget-happy charm. Cuckoo Chaos, a California band of three guitars, bass and drums, uses those guitars to mingle West African-style counterpoint with some indie-rock noise; its songs were precise and rhapsodic, each evolution well planned. There were electronic pulses and hints of India and Africa in the songs of Young Magic, an Australian band aiming for the propulsive and the hypnotic. The Barr Brothers, from Canada, laced their folky songs with touches of West and North Africa, including Morroccan metal castanets. And across CMJ the accoutrement of the year seemed to be an extra tom-tom: something for a singer or keyboardist to sock for an additional layer of rhythm.

Punk is a CMJ perennial, but it can sound preservationist, as it did with Bleached, a band with bleached-blond lead singers, four-chord songs and determinedly unswerving dynamics. Pujol, a punky songwriter from Nashville, had a better idea: adding some twang and a skipped beat now and then, with a little self-revelation in the lyrics. Trash Talk, a California band, played unregenerate and unstoppable 1980s hardcore: sudden, pummeling shouts and guitar-scrabbling outbursts that incited mosh pits well after 2 a.m.

But some of CMJ’s best moments this year looked even further back: toward roots-rock, far away from laptops, concepts and surface cleverness. The Texas bluesman Gary Clark Jr. played sets that were simply incendiary, following bleak sentiments with slashing guitar solos. And a band called Alabama Shakes, led by a bespectacled songwriter and guitarist, Brittany Howard, harked back to the fervor and smoldering drama of 1960s Southern soul and left its audience screaming for more. They were working CMJ the old-fashioned way: making converts with sheer live impact, now letting the Internet multiply the word of mouth.

A version of this article appears in print on October 24, 2011, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Glut of Bands, Amid a Fog of Blaring Sound. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe